"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
get up off your knees, boy
Stand face to face with your god
Something cold ripples through her.
If she did not know better, she might have thought it fear.
Because he is the protector and here he is, eyes rolling, turning to her with some distant expression. Rearing back his head and spitting at her. And how terribly it burns when it seeps into her skin!
She cries out, a strangled sound that rakes its way up her throat! Something foreign, animal, ferocious. It claws stardust up her throat and the air around them smells spent gunpowder. Her shoulder trembles where the poison singed her skin and she bares her fanged teeth, nostrils flared.
He swims back to the surface, she tracks his progress. Alas, she will not spare him. She waits for him to swing his gaze back to her. Waits for him to speak, steady. Something has changed.
Everything has changed.
How innocently he looks to her then and fury flares white-hot in the cavern of her chest while her skin continues to quiver. She lunges for him then, sinks her teeth into the meat of his neck until she tastes blood on her tongue. Wants to kill him. Everything in her wants to tear him limb from limb. Wants to destroy him.
Not simply because he’d hurt but because he’d betrayed her trust.
She releases him but does not draw her mouth away. “You think I won’t kill you?” she hisses, draconic eyes burning such a fierce red. “Touch me again and I promise it’ll be the last thing you do.”
ALTAR
@[obelisk]
@[The Monsters] let's see what happens to her glaciem intus now
@[altar] your glaciem intus has mutated into ice healing. you're welcome. (this is 7 spaces of traits, let me know in updates what you'd like non-genetic)
He doesn’t push her off or deliberately push poison into her bloodstream until she bends. He does not even know that he could. Instead he hits his knees and closes his eyes, he feels tears against his cheeks and the knowing that he deserves this—that he deserves this always. He bends his horned head and feels his flesh split against her sharp teeth. He bites back the hiss of pain, the strangled cry that would otherwise rise to the surface. Instead he swallows it down and folds his wings over his back.
“You should,” he says, his throaty voice heavy, the confusion still swirling in his head. “You should,” he says again, not daring to lift his eyes to look at her. Not daring to look at the pure fury on her face. It would be like looking at the sun—like staring straight into the white hot heat and letting it sear.
“I don’t know what happened,” he says but it sounds like a dull excuse on his tongue. He wants to ask her if he’s okay. If he’s going to survive. If this is what dying feels like, but he can only feel her hot breath and the sizzle of poison under his skin. The acidic blood that now swells with poison he cannot control.
He draws it from her, keeping the blood by her mouth clean.
He directs it at himself.
It bleeds from his nose and his mouth and his eyes. Froth at the corner of his lips. Blood beginning to pool from his eyes. “It won’t happen again,” he manages, his tongue swelling, his throat closing. He blinks it away but he’s too confused, too ashamed, too weak to try and control it. All of his self-loathing manifests in the knife that he buries to the hilt in his own chest. He coughs and it splatters again.
“It won’t—,” he splutters before he falls to the ground, choking.
turn your head toward the storm that’s surely coming along
get up off your knees, boy
Stand face to face with your god
How startling this turn of events.
How long ago was it that they were pressed so close?
How long ago since she promised him the stars?
Since she told him she’d take him to the place where things ended?
And now she is vowing to kill him and he’s practically begging her to, folding beneath her will. And there is something in it that disgusts her so completely that she releases him, recoils. For the space of a breath, she hates him.
Only days before she had loved him, spared him from her wrath, loved him because he worshipped her.
But she hates him, too, for the power he’d had over her. The way he’d been able to hurt her. (She is too distracted by her hate to notice the way that the flesh has begun to stitch itself back together, using the ice leftover just beneath the surface of her skin.) She hates him for lying to her, insisting he hadn’t known what happened when he’d spit his poison at her. (And where had the poison come from anyway? Something’s changed.)
Her sides heave and her nostrils flare as she watches him fold, bleeding. Blood, everywhere the blood. She is equal parts disgusted and horrified. Any moment, she thinks, she will awaken from this nightmare and he will be there, watching diligently and she will laugh her stardust laugh and tell him how blood had poured from his mouth and his eyes. How he’d choked on it.
“Obelisk,” she says sharply, taking a half-step toward him.
She hates him, certainly. But she will not watch him die, not like this.
She reaches down to nudge him, still unaware of the new way she has changed. There is not enough ice left beneath the surface of her skin to rescue him from the throes completely, but perhaps there is enough to take the edge off, enough to allow him to breathe.
He is nearly blind with the poison now, with the blood.
It stings, but in a way that feels nearly good—a sharp-edged pain that he recognizes as his own. He wants to lean into it further, wants that knife to bite into the skin until he gasps. It is what he deserves, he thinks, and there’s something like joy to be found in getting just that. Something like joy to know that he is giving that punishment to himself so that Altar does not have to sully her hands in doing the task.
But she says his name and it drags him back from the precipice, catches him just before he plunges over.
The sharpness in her voice stings in a way that his poison never could and he coughs up blood, closing his eyes so she would not have to look upon all the ways that he has destroyed himself at her feet. At the way that he gladly broke himself open just to soothe her own rage—how he would do it, again and again.
She touches and he doesn’t recoil, even though he is expecting the same ice to greet him. It is still there, but it is milder and nearly sweet. It is a healing touch that takes the bite out of the pain he feels. Partially because of the actual way it slowly heals him but mostly because she would dare touch him at all.
His breathing slows as the poison slowly recoils further in his chest.
He feels it slowly pull back into him and the bleeding even slows.
The foam still flecks the edges of his mouth, blood dried, and he rises, shaking, his body a map of tremors and fault lines. He doesn’t lift his head to look at her, doesn’t dare to look upon her, but he stands.
“I’ll go,” he finally manages, knowing she wouldn’t want to look at him any longer.
Knowing that he would remain hidden in the shadows, where he could watch and try to protect her.
(Not that she needed protecting, not with him gone.)
turn your head toward the storm that’s surely coming along
